To say that chef Naomi Pomeroy has strong opinions about food would be a profound understatement.
On a bright day in December, we’re in the kitchen of her hugely popular Portland restaurant, Beast, and Pomeroy is prepping onions for the French onion soup she’ll be serving later that night to her forty-eight dinner guests. In the time we spend together, she spends most of it prepping these onions: there’s a giant plastic crate full of them. She needs that many onions because they’ll cook down into a golden, concentrated mass to which she’ll add her wildly intense meat stock. She’ll season it with Tabasco and thirty-year-aged balsamic vinegar, and it will be the best French onion soup I’ve ever had, but right now she’s peeling off onion skin and talking to me about the weather.
“Weather is a big influence on what I cook,” she tells me. “On a rainy day, I like comfort foods, something meaty. On a hot day, I like lighter foods. I don’t want to cook inside, so I’ll grill.”
The discussion about food and weather leads to a conversation about balancing a menu. “When you plan a menu, you have to think start to finish. You don’t serve a creamy pork entrée and then serve chocolate for dessert.”
I pause for a second. Didn’t I do that once? “What do you serve?”
“Something fruity and bright.”
She informs me that chefs frequently judge customers who order the wrong dessert to follow their entrée or, in other cases, the wrong glass of wine.
“There’s nothing more painful,” she says, “than making a beautiful velouté of asparagus, sending it out, and watching someone wash it down with a big glass of Cabernet.”
She tenses up. “I want to scream: ‘That wine is ruining your soup and your soup is ruining that wine!’” She pauses and concludes, “Sometimes people need to be told what to do.”
Which is why Beast is the perfect vehicle for Pomeroy to channel her need for control. Eating dinner at Beast is like going to someone’s house for dinner. The menu is prewritten (so no one can order the wrong dessert) and there are no substitutions.
“I throw a dinner party every night,” says Pomeroy. “That’s all we do here.”
Except, most dinner parties we all normally go to involve a thrown-together lasagna; Pomeroy’s dinner party starts with that dazzling French onion soup, moves on to foie gras bonbons, steak tartare and quail egg toast, and pig’s-head terrine. It continues with dry-aged, grass-fed beef wrapped in bacon and served with lentils and turnips, relaxes into butter lettuce salad with fried Meyer lemons, and finishes with a cheese plate and, for dessert, an elegant chocolate soufflé that’s also a bit scruffy. (“There’s digital cooking and analog,” says Pomeroy. “We’re very analog. We like the scratches and pops.”)
Control is a tricky issue for many eaters. After all, eating is an intimate act: most diners want to have some say in what they feed their bodies. But when you put yourself into the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, or, inversely, when you let others put themselves into your hands, the results can be sublime. “You can just feel it,” Pomeroy tells me before I leave that night. “You can just tell when food is made with a measure of love in the heart.”
Like a mother who meddles in her children’s lives because she wants the very best for them, Pomeroy meddles with her dinner plates until they’re exactly what she thinks should be eaten. Some may call her a control freak, but it’s her insistence on control that makes her food taste so good.
“My number one pet peeve is when an element is on the plate just for the color.”
Serves 4
Accuse me of hyperbolizing, I don’t care. This is the French onion soup of your dreams, the one you fantasize about slurping in your Parisian fantasy where, on a cold winter’s day, you stumble into a bistro and warm up over a bowl of soupe à l’oignon. What makes it so good? It all comes down to the rich and flavorful meat stock. Make sure, at the end, to pump up the flavor with the balsamic and Tabasco before ladling it into the bowls. It pays to make a lot: this soup goes fast.
6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter
6 to 8 onions, peeled and sliced into thin half-moons
Kosher salt
6 cups Beast Stock
Tabasco sauce
30-year-aged balsamic vinegar or the best balsamic you have
4 slices toasted ciabatta bread or French bread (toast on a grill or under a broiler)
1 cup shredded Gruyère cheese
In a large stockpot or Dutch oven, melt the butter on high heat and then add all the onions. Add a light sprinkling of salt and stir, coating the onions, and allow them to cook until they start to brown, stirring frequently. As soon as you see a little color, 5 to 10 minutes, lower the heat to medium low and continue to cook, stirring and scraping the bottom of the pan, until the onions are a very dark shade of brown, 30 to 45 minutes*.
Add all the stock and another sprinkling of salt. Bring to a simmer on medium heat, then turn the heat down to low and allow the soup to cook for another 30 minutes.
Taste the soup and adjust it with salt, Tabasco, and the balsamic. This is your chance to make the soup taste as great as possible.
Preheat the oven to 500°F and place 4 ovenproof soup bowls on a cookie sheet. Add a piece of toasted bread to each bowl and then ladle the soup over the bread, filling each bowl three quarters of the way. Top each bowl with some of the grated cheese and pop into the oven.
Bake until the cheese is melted and starting to brown. Serve the soup piping hot.
Serves 4
This is a special-occasion dish, the kind of meal you make when dinner really matters. Truth be told, once you make a demi-glace all you need to do is season the meat, sear it and roast it, and then caramelize the turnips. Just make sure to follow Pomeroy’s directive about letting the meat rest: “If you’re eating meat that’s hot, it hasn’t been properly rested. Get the plate hot and the sauce hot and let the meat rest for twenty minutes.”
FOR THE BEEF
½ cup dried porcini mushrooms, ground in a spice grinder (to yield ¼ cup porcini powder)
Kosher salt
¼ cup coarsely ground black pepper
1 tablespoon truffle salt (see Resources), plus more for later (optional)
4- to 5-pound prime rib* of beef
Olive oil
FOR THE TURNIPS
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
8 medium turnips, cleaned and quartered (no need to peel)
Maple sugar (see Resources) or muscovado sugar
Freshly ground black pepper
TO SERVE
Fleur de sel or other finishing salt
Chopped parsley
In a bowl, combine the porcini powder, ½ cup kosher salt, the coarsely ground pepper, and the truffle salt, if you’re using it. Rub the mixture all over the outside of the prime rib. Allow the meat to sit and come to room temperature, at least 1 hour.
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
In a roasting pan large enough to hold the beef, heat 1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil over high heat until almost smoking. Sear the meat on all sides until crusty and brown all over. When it’s seared, place the pan in the oven and roast until it reaches an internal temperature of 120°F, about 1 hour. Tent the meat with foil and allow to rest for at least 20 minutes.
In a large sauté pan, heat the butter until foamy and hot and then add the turnips. Sprinkle with the maple sugar* and cook, stirring often to keep the sugar from burning, until bronzed on the outside and just cooked through, 10 to 15 minutes. Season with lots of kosher salt and pepper.
Heat the demi-glace in a small pan.
Drizzle demi-glace over the serving plates, slice the meat into thick slices, and place the meat atop the sauce. Spoon the turnips on the side and drizzle more demi-glace onto the meat; sprinkle with fleur de sel and parsley. Serve immediately.
Serves 4 to 6
This dish is so named because every time I turned my back, Pomeroy added another ingredient. “What is that?” “Oh, just some anchovies.” “And that?” “Lamb belly.” And so it went as I cooked with her. The end result is a lentil dish that’s sweet from the sun-dried tomatoes, briny from the anchovies, and porky from the pancetta. You can make this a few hours ahead and let the flavors meld before eating—just reheat with a splash of water.
2 cups dried green lentils
1 carrot, plus 2 carrots finely chopped
1 celery stalk, plus 2 stalks finely chopped
½ medium yellow onion, plus 1 medium yellow onion cut into ¼-inch dice
¼ cup olive oil
½ cup diced pancetta*
A pinch of crushed red pepper flakes
A pinch or two of maple sugar (see Resources) or muscovado sugar
6 sun-dried tomatoes* packed in olive oil
3 anchovies, chopped
3 cloves garlic, sliced
½ cup kale, blanched, squeezed dry, and chopped
A squeeze of fresh lemon juice
A splash of first-press olive oil (or the freshest olive oil you have)
Start by par-cooking the lentils. In a large pot, add the lentils, the carrot, the celery, and the onion half and cover with cold water by at least an inch. Bring up the heat slowly to a simmer* and cook the lentils until just al dente, 15 to 20 minutes. Drain, discard the vegetables, and set the lentils aside.
In a large pan, heat the olive oil with the pancetta over medium-high heat until very hot and the pancetta starts to render. Allow it to cook until the pancetta is crisp and has released most of its fat, 4 to 5 minutes.
Remove the pancetta to a plate and add the chopped carrot and celery and the diced onion. Sprinkle with the red pepper flakes and the maple sugar; cook, stirring, for 1 to 2 minutes.
Add the tomatoes, fry for a minute, then add the anchovies and the garlic*. Cook until the anchovies dissolve and the garlic just starts to brown, another 2 minutes or so.
Pat the lentils dry and add them to the pan, frying them in the hot oil until they start to crisp up a bit, 3 to 4 minutes.
Add the pancetta and the kale and cook, stirring, for another 2 minutes. If the lentils are getting too brown, you can add some water at this point.
Taste for seasoning, squeeze the lemon juice over everything, and drizzle with the great olive oil. Serve hot.
Makes about 4 quarts of stock and about 1 cup of demi-glace
Pssst … lean in close, I don’t want to be too loud about this. What you’re about to receive here, in this recipe, are the keys to the kingdom. These keys open the door to the intimidating world of classic French cooking techniques—techniques that stretch all the way back to Escoffier and live on today in the kitchens of the world’s greatest restaurants. Make this Beast Stock from Pomeroy’s Beast restaurant and you will have an elixir that will not only make for the best French onion soup of your life, but will also provide the basis for a demi-glace—a concentrated, syrupy, meaty sauce—that will elevate any and every meat dish you make forevermore. Welcome to the big leagues.
FOR THE STOCK
10 pounds veal bones*
2 onions, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
6 tablespoons tomato paste
½ bottle good red wine
10 whole black peppercorns
1 whole head of garlic, unpeeled, kept intact
3 sprigs of thyme
FOR THE DEMI-GLACE
30-year-aged balsamic vinegar*
Truffle salt* (see Resources)
Preheat the oven to 500°F.
Arrange the bones in a single layer in a roasting pan*. Roast for 1 to 1½ hours, until the bones are a nice brown color, but be careful not to let them burn;* you may need to flip them over every so often.
Add the onions, carrots, celery, and tomato paste to the pan, stir, and continue to roast for another 30 to 45 minutes, until all the vegetables have browned.
Remove the roasting pan and, with a pair of tongs or a large spoon, transfer the contents of the pan to a large stockpot. Carefully set the roasting pan on 2 burners, turn on medium heat, and add the wine, peppercorns, garlic, and thyme. Cook, scraping the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon until the wine has reduced slightly. Pour the wine, peppercorns, garlic, and thyme into the stockpot with the bones.
Add 6 to 8 quarts cold water to the stockpot (it should just cover the bones when you add it). Turn on the heat to medium low and bring the liquid to the gentlest of gentle simmers*, half-covering the pot with a lid. When you get to the gentle simmer, lower the heat to as low as it goes. Cook like this for as many hours as you can afford: at least 8 and up to 12. Skim the top every so often.
Strain the stock into 2 pots or large bowls. Discard the solids. Reserve one quarter of the stock for making the demi-glace (see the next step) and the rest for the French onion soup, if making. Any stock that you don’t use now, you can freeze; it will keep for up to 6 months.
Pour the stock reserved for the demi-glace into a pot. Turn up the heat to medium and bring the stock to an active simmer. Let it reduce (this will take a few hours) until it coats a spoon fully but not to the point that it’s sticky. If it gets too thick, you can fix it with a little water. Season with the aged balsamic and truffle salt until it tastes mind-blowingly wonderful. Use immediately or reserve for later. It will keep for up to a week, covered, in the refrigerator and for up to 3 months in the freezer.
